English - Support to Participatory Constitution Building in Nepal ...

The Remake of a Stategiven for categorising households always include the obvious ones of foodsecurity (land ownership) and income (a regular salary is highly favoured),but also take into account social and other factors. Commonly quotedindicators of well-being include good political connections outside thevillage (source force); all family members in a good health; the affordabilityto all children’s education; the ability to lend money; and (in some cases)owning a household toilet 7 . For the bipanna, handicap or long-termillness, old age and debt are usually mentioned, but the most commonfactor is social isolation – something strongly abhorred in Nepali culture,and worsened by the absence of State-provided social protection (see theexample of Manomaya Majhi, Box 4.1).Box 4.1 Manomaya Majhi: An identified bipanna suffering from social isolationThe Majhis are a low caste hill group who traditionally gain their livelihoods from fishingand ferrying people across rivers in small boats. Their caste means that they generallylive on marginal land close to large rivers– thus spatial poverty is, in their case, effectivelycaste-induced.Manomaya Majhi is about 50 years old, and is married to Gore Majhi. He is her secondhusband – the first died, without them having any children. The couple lives in a smallone-roomed house close to the Tama Koshi (a major river). They used to possess somekhet land, but it was swept away by the river during one monsoon. The construction of asuspension bridge across the river means that there is no longer any ferry work. Of theirsix children, three died at their quite young age. The other three (two daughters and ason) have all migrated to Kathmandu, where they work for hours as unskilled labourers,mainly in brick factories (still earning more than they could make locally). Their son isliving with a woman, but has not married her due to insufficient money. The girls havemarried, and have five children, all girls, between them. Manomaya and Gore had to takea loan at the local interest rate Rs 400 per month for each 10,000 (48% per annum) tocover the marriage and other costs, which they are still repaying. Gore is thus often awayin Kathmandu, seeking work. He himself has had four wives; the first three all left him ashe was away earning money, and they found other husbands. There was one son fromGore’s first marriage, but he died at the age of 21, leaving a widow and two children, ofwhom one also died. The other now works in a tea stall in Kathmandu.Manomaya has thus lived through the death of one husband, three children, one stepchild,and one grand-child, plus the loss of the family land. She also experiences theeffective loss of her surviving three children, step-child and grand-children, whom sherarely sees. She jokes that she stayed with Gore through lack of alternatives – but she alsocomplains that she feels alone.According to the new GoN Community Forestry Guidelines (2008), allCFUGs are expected to conduct well-being ranking when developing orrenewing their Operational Plans.7Probably influenced by the activities of SDC’s health project.71